Five things to do this week: October 6-12

October 6-12: Five arts & cultural things to do in Toronto this week

1. FILM: Telling the tales of human-led environmental degradation around the world can often involve some of the most dangerous investigative journalism that happens outside of war zones, with arresting results. Caroline Bâcle’s Lost Rivers, about buried historic waterways (something this city knows a thing or two about) opens a strong lineup at this year’s Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival, with screenings supplemented by workshops and talks, including Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes) in a roundtable alongside her husband, filmmaker Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky. Plus, pick from filmic examinations of Quebec’s asbestos industry, shanty towns in Brazil, the life of the average Canadian tree-planter, and dozens of others, before the program concludes with Chasing Ice, by James Balog, a National Geographic photographer and founder of the Extreme Ice Survey, who charted his experiences setting up time-lapse cameras in sub-zero temperatures to track climate change from its front lines.
• Oct. 10 to 14. TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St. W. $12 (more for galas) or $80 for 10/film pass; festival pass: $110; visit planetinfocus.org/film-festival for details and tickets.

2. MUSIC: A few years back, having made the jump to Brushfire Records — the label owned by American folk-rock stalwart Jack Johnson — it looked as if Neil Halstead was poised to break out big. But the singer-songwriter from Reading, England, is still very much an unknown commodity on our shores, despite a new album, Palindrome Hunches, that contains a distinctly expansive, American vibe, with liberal amounts of harmonica. Halstead plays the sort of songs that you’ll want your friends to learn to play around the fire next summer, and speaks to a ballad-driven male folk-rock tradition that ranges from Nick Drake to Mumford and Sons on their side of the Atlantic to Jeff Tweedy to Dallas Green on ours.
• Oct. 8, 10 p.m. The Dakota Tavern, 249 Ossington Ave. $22.50; tickets at Rotate This and the venue.

3. CIVICS: This isn’t just any old National History Month — it’s the 200th Anniversary of the War of 1812, and City Museums are celebrating the boost to nationhood that conflict with the United States brought to a then still fledgling British colony ruled by King George III. But many events this month are also investigating social histories of the people, especially in York (now Toronto), who experienced the vicious conflict first-hand. Talks such as The Fight for Legitimacy: Black History and the War of 1812 (Oct. 11), part of a lecture series on untold stories of the war, will take over at Fort York (250 Fort York Blvd.) all month. A similar series exploring “context and consequence” of the war at Montgomery’s Inn (4709 Dundas St. W.), will offer up such talks as Military Music of the War of 1812, while at Spadina Museum (285 Spadina Rd.) an interactive multimedia art installation aims to reconstruct the visual planes through which the people of 1812 took in their environs. Finally, on Oct. 14 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., at Todmorden Mills Heritage Site (Pottery Road, East of Bayview Avenue), taste the humble cuisine of the era, when even upper classes dealt with food shortages ($20).
• Through Nov. 1, various times and venues. $5-$10 for admission to most events; visit toronto.ca/1812 for a full schedule and details for events listed above.

4. ANIMALS: Having had neither Werner Herzog nor Pixar place them under the media spotlight’s glare, African penguins — the chubbier, stockier honking coastal cousins of the Antarctic crews — nonetheless achieved a certain level of notoriety, at least in these parts, following the separation of the “potentially homosexual” pair of birds named Pedro and Buddy at the zoo last year. Of course, when Buddy split off from his pal to mate with female penguin Farai, the story dropped from the headlines pretty quickly. Male and female birds doing there thing and propagating the species just isn’t news, you know? Except, of course, that one coupling in captivity hardly means this endangered wildlife no longer needs our attention, and that’s where Penguin Awareness Day at the Toronto Zoo comes in. Keepers will be on hand all day to give talks about how they care for the local colony, and things being done by conservationists in the wild to mitigate environmental threats to these lively feathered creatures.
• October 8, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. 2000 Meadowvale Rd. (at Sheppard Avenue East.) $25; visit torontozoo.com for details and directions.

5. PHOTOGRAPHY: The world’s largest and most prestigious contest for shutterbugs, professional and otherwise, World Press Photo annually brings us the most visceral recap of the biggest global news, arts and sporting stories, as told in neatly framed moments. But it’s in the smaller worlds outside our own narrow mediascapes, the ones that don’t even make the nightly news and for which we have no reference points — such as the armies of tuna migrating under the ocean’s surface; the domestic side of public street protests in Egypt and Yemen; and among the poor and forgotten in America, living in slums that look almost war-torn — where the World Press exhibit reveals its full power to move and dislodge what we think we know about the world around us. If some pictures are worth a 1,000 words, then these are probably closer to priceless in their ability to take your breath away.
• Through October 26, daily from 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Brookfield Place, Allen Lambert Galleria, 181 Bay St. Free; visit worldpressphoto.org Toronto for details.